Stories in skin

When I think of important events in my life and how they’ve left their marks on my soul I also acknowledge their physical parallels in the marks on my body. We all have them, the scars acquired from bicycle accidents, chicken pox or surgery scars that are all unintentional marks with stories behind them. Then there are intentional marks, the tattoos that have become more common and less taboo in our society, each with its own story as well. When we think of saving stories about ourselves or our lives we don’t often consider those aspects. They become so much a part of us we must be reminded and queried, “Where’d you get that scar grandpa?” or “Why did you chose that particular design auntie?” before we think to include them in our biography ™. We think of life stories in terms of writing on paper or screen or the impressions we create with digital media. But what about the “writing on the body”? It’s analog but do we think of preserving it? Sometimes preservation happened unintentionally to be later found by archaeologists to prove the long history of tattoos along with other cultural artifacts, but not often intentionally. There are variations that come up in literature itself, or use the body to preserve the history of the donor. It’s called anthropodermic bibliopegy, and for most this seems a horrifying idea. I wonder why that is. How we became so fearful of physical remains. Why we would consider keeping our loved one’s ashes but not their skin, especially if it was marked with a story that was important to them at one time?